Tuesday, February 10, 2009

It's free, online, and useful for helping students to identify the main ideas in a text and what has been omitted. It creates beautiful word clouds that act in some ways like a graph - a visual representation of information.

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends." (quote taken from wordle.net)

This week I used Wordle after a class brainstorm on our ideal classroom, ideal teacher and ideal classmate. Students wrote their thoughts on post-it notes. I took these and typed the text into Wordle. Wordle then generated a word cloud that I could print out and display on the wall as a reminder for students about what they thought. It was interesting to see how highly 'sport' and 'computers' featured in these word clouds.

I'm planning to use a scanner to scan in newspaper articles during our unit on newspapers. I'll grab the text, pop it into Wordle and use it to help teach students about visually scanning a text and determining main ideas.

Here are some more ideas that you might find useful:Speeches of US presidents have been transformed into word clouds. This information gives a visual representation of issues that were pertinent at the time of the speech.

Welcome

About Me

I am currently teaching a Year 1 class. I love what I do and the kids I teach. I am easily inspired and love to find ways to improve learning for my students using a variety of strategies and ideas. My goal is to remain a flexible teacher, taking on board the new things I learn and modifying my practices as necessary.
I hope that I can motivate and inspire others in this same endeavour.
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